Without text searchability, it is very difficult for litigation support or eDiscovery professionals to work with scanned legal documents. They have to skim through the entire scanned PDFs to search for a particular key term or phrase. Thanks to the technology called optical character recognition (OCR). An OCR software helps us to make scanned pdf searchable. OCR technology makes it really easy to search in scanned legal documents for a particular search term. 

Why OCR Technology? The importance of text searchability for scanned legal documents

 Legal cases produce large volumes of paper documents and other scanned documents which are flat images.Attorneys and litigation support persons have to manually process and search through these documents to perform successful litigation.

These Large-scale documents and inconsistent filing procedures make it very difficult to access the information and, in turn, threaten the effectiveness of litigation process. Many legal professionals continue to do manual document discovery which is time-consuming and may create many problems for legal professionals.

 A scanned PDF is just a photo of a  text document embedded in PDF format. There is no text layer in a scanned document. So if you search for a word in a scanned PDF, you won't see any search result. But when This scanned PDF goes through the OCR process, the OCR software "recognizes" the text content and then adds an invisible text layer to this scanned PDF. This new format of "sandwiched PDF" is known as a searchable PDF. A searchable PDF is a scanned PDF file with added hidden text. This text layer can be searched for a keyword or phrase using the "search" functionality of a PDFreader software like Adobe Reader. Text from this new PDF file can be selected and copied to another text editor program like Notepad.

Why is it important to make your scanned legal documents searchable?

It is very important to make your scanned legal documents searchable because searchable PDF text can be indexed via the text indexing functionality of your document management system. This can be really helpful in the eDiscovery process since the information in your scanned document is readily available now.No more skimming through the scanned PDFs, your scanned legal documents are text searchable now. When a litigation support person needs a particular case, searchable PDFs make it easy to discover the required information. Case preparation work is more efficient with text searchability and it eliminates the burden of manually surfing through heaps of scanned PDFs. Searchable PDFs make it easy to locate files using a specific keyword and listing relevant documents in seconds. 

Some of the main benefits of applying OCR on legal documents can be summarised as below;

• Quick discovery cycles
• Accuracy
• Better litigation readiness
• Ease of access to legal documents
• Reduce the cost associated with the eDiscovery process
• Fewer chances of missing a legal document

OCR technology serves as an effective solution to perform the most important eDiscovery tasks in legal cases with high accuracy. OCR eliminates the manual document discovery process in the legal field.

How can OCRvision help a legal firm in litigation support and eDiscovery?

OCRvison is a multi-language OCR software that can help an organization to automate the scanned PDF to searchable PDF OCR conversion. Using OCRvision, You can configure your scanned PDF folder as a watched folder. OCRvision software runs in the background and monitors this folder for any newly scanned documents and OCR converts these documents to searchable PDFs (batch OCR folder). This searchable PDF content will now start to appear in your document management system search results. OCRvision is an offline OCR software solution which converts scanned documents and images in different formats (TIFF, PDF or JPEG ) to searchable PDFs automatically. It performs automatic OCR of pdf files. This text recognition generates fully searchable "text under image" that can be used for archiving.

Automatic OCR using our OCRvision searchable PDF software streamline the process of litigation discovery. OCR changes the manual document discovery process and enables highly qualified and well-paid lawyers and employees to focus on the most important and critical tasks. Automatic OCR and digitization of paper-based and static documents into searchable PDFs provide more reliable, effective, and inexpensive litigation support.